Voice Recognition for
Medical Transcriptionists

How does voice recognition work? When it comes to transcribing speech recognition, also known as voice recognition, it's not really a whole new ball game, but perhaps more like the same game on another planet!

In other words, the rules of the game are the same - expertise in medical terminology and English grammar, familiarity with recommended doses of the 100 or so most prescribed drugs, an "ear" for regional and foreign accents, keyboarding speed - but the environment in which you're working is different.

So how does voice recognition for transcriptionists work?

I'll start with what is known as the back-end system. Here, the doctors dictate as they usually do, via telephone or digital recorder, then the stored files are run through a voice recognition program and the transcriptionist downloads the text, the "report", that is generated which includes an attached voice file and so begins her/his day.

At this point, the voice recognition transcriptionist operates the foot pedal, just like a regular voice file, and listens to the dictation while, at the same time, reading the attached report. In some systems, as the doctor says each word, it is highlighted in gray or yellow, and the transcriptionist follows the highlighter zipping through the report in sync to the spoken dictation. In this instance, if you let up on your foot pedal to stop the dictation because you need to edit a word, the cursor is at the highlighted word. Other systems require you to read along the document in sync to the spoken dictation and, when there's an edit to be made, you manually put the cursor at that word.

So far, so good, right? What could be easier, right? A monkey could do it, right?

WRONG!!

Transcribing speech recognition still requires the same expertise in medical terminology and English grammar, familiarity with recommended doses of the 100 or so most prescribed drugs, an "ear" for regional and foreign accents, keyboarding speed mentioned above, but here are some of the differences:

• Strict adherence to rules of English grammar is no longer necessary. Over-editing is death to a medical transcriptionist's paycheck! For those of us who are perfectionists, it takes a conscious act of will to NOT put that comma where it should go (unless it's needed to clarify meaning) or even to match singular and pleural.
• Your focus needs to shift from keyboarding to reading. Voice recognition transcription puts a draft report in front of you, not a blank report. See the difference? Your job is now to read through that report and make only mandatory corrections which will make the report accurate. You have to let go of your perfectionist tendencies and concentrate on accuracy and speed.
• For almost all of your reports, you can increase the dictation speed since we normally read faster than we type. This will allow you to edit more lines per day, thus increasing your paycheck!

What are the mandatory corrections? These will ALWAYS apply to every report you edit.

• Patient demographics
• Name (although most companies will not allow you to put the patient's name in the report because of confidentiality reasons - substitute "the patient")
• Age
• Location
• Medications (duh!)
• Correct name and whether generic or propietary
• Dose
• How often it is administered

• Allergies
• Measurements
• Laboratory values
• Patient's history and procedures
• Contradictions and discrepancies - for instance, left/right mistakes (was that the patient's left arm that's broken or right arm?)

Finally, when it comes to transcribing voice recognition, forget your mouse. Your hands should never leave the keyboard. Learn all of your keyboard shortcuts and use them. Ask your company for any keyboard shortcuts that apply to the voice recognition program you are using. Here are some common ones for Microsoft Word that will make life a whole lot easier for you.

• CTRL+arrow to jump ahead or back one word at a time
• CTRL+delete to delete the word in front of the cursor
• CTRL+backspace to delete the word behind the cursor
• HOME to go to the beginning of the line your cursor is on
• END to go to the end of the line your cursor is on
• CTRL+HOME to go to the top of the report
• CTRL+END to to to the end of the report
• SHIFT+F3 to capitalize or uncapitalize (it's a toggle function) the word your cursor is on.

Voice recognition is here to stay, and that's as it should be. Some of you may remember when computers were only seen and used at work and you used DOS! My, how our world has been changed by personal computers, laptops, cell phones, PDAs, GPS in cars. Change is good, change is great!

Now figure out how YOU are going to cash in on this trend!